Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
Ahh, Laserdisc. We never had a Laserdisc player, I only heard about it because a relative in the US had one. Of course, mom and dad visited them and came back raving about it, how they watched Terminator in incredibly clarity, and it sounded amazing. I would bug my dad as a kid -- for all the stupid home theatre equipment he'd buy -- why he never bought a Laserdisc player. "What the hell do we need one for, James?" We went from VHS to DVD, which was definitely the right answer, but I've always been an early adopter at heart.
So even today at the age of 37, I have never watched a single movie on Laserdisc, ever. I haven't even seen or held one, I have more experience with 8-track tapes which were already phased out of retail stores by the time I was born, which is weird considering Laserdisc's rise and fall largely happened in the 90s.
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We're about the same age, but luckily I had family friends who had a LaserDisc player. (They were also the only people I knew with a Betamax VCR, lol.) As compared to VHS, they were spectacular. Far, far, far better than VHS. Frankly to my untrained eye, the picture on a CRT TV of the time was pretty similar to DVD quality.
The only downsides I remember were:
- The discs could only hold about an hour of video, so most feature releases had to be two-disc (or even three) "albums". You generally had to get up and change discs or flip the disc over halfway through a movie.
- The discs themselves were heavy. Far, far heavier than a CD/DVD/Bluray. By feel, I'd wager they were about twice the weight of a 12" vinyl LP; half a pound or more. Given the weight they were very unwieldy and felt fragile; you had to treat them very very carefully so as not to scratch them. Swapping discs around was a two-hand task.
- The machines themselves were noisy; a lot noisier than CD/DVD/Bluray players. Our friends kept their LaserDisc player in a home entertainment centre with a door on it, with their home stereo equipment, rather than set on top or under the TV on an open credenza or something. (Where a VCR was more typically kept.)